


…And You Will Know Me by the Trail of the Dead

by lilithenaltum



Series: The Valki Fics [6]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angst and Tragedy, Angst with a Happy Ending, I Can't Believe I Wrote This, I ain't gonna tell ya who but you'll figure it out by the end, I guess it's a happy ending yeah?, Jeez, Like really immortal, Loki becomes a god, Loki is immortal, Multi, NO ONE KNOWS, Reincarnation, This is not a good thing, Why Did I Write This?, a little gory at the end there, incesty sorta if you really think about it, mentions of cannibalism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-08
Updated: 2018-01-08
Packaged: 2019-03-02 00:17:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13306374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilithenaltum/pseuds/lilithenaltum
Summary: He is the last of them left.They tell stories about their creation, of how Loki Silvertongue took the Valkyrie to wife and sired the Five, how everyone on this planet and even past it are the offspring of that union, and how one day, the great being would come back to visit his children. Loki wants to scream at them, to make them stop the lies. 'No! I am no father of yours! I am not your sire, I did not make you!' But he knows the truth, and after many years he stops fighting it.They are his progeny, and he is their god.





	…And You Will Know Me by the Trail of the Dead

**Author's Note:**

> AN: If you really want to cry (and by cry, I mean sob your eyes out) while reading this, go play Radiohead's "Pyramid Song" on repeat till you make it to the end. Sorry in advance lol.
> 
> I love comments! Thanks for reading.

He is the last of them left.

 

He has lost friends and allies and old favorite enemies over the years, their lifespans not but a tenth of that of the Aesir, and each of these sting. He comforts his brothers when the Avengers fall to old age and is there to greet the next generation of superheros that follow in their footsteps. But it is when he loses those he truly loves does the pieces of Loki's heart begin to fragment and break.

 

Sif was the first to go. Loki is angry that she isn't allowed a warrior's death, the kind she deserves, or to grow old and happy, surrounded by children and grandchildren. Instead she is taken by illness, confined to her bed for weeks and months of agony and wasting away. Thor can not bear to see her thus and so he rarely visits, spending his days locked in the study of the palace, his grief driving him into madness. It is up to Loki and Brunnhilde, and the Thorsons who can not grasp why their mother is fading away ( _Asgardians don't die like this, this isn't natural_ ), to care for Sif till the end. She understands, and only asks that her husband sit beside her while she draws her final breath. By some miracle, Thor's eldest son manages to drag his father away from his exile so that Sif can go in peace.

 

“She wasn't supposed to die like this,” Loki says during the funeral, stricken that his once young and vibrant sister in law is now lifeless and empty. His wife says nothing, only wipes her tears and grasps his hand in comfort. Sif was the sister that he had never truly had, the one he only really appreciated too late. Her body floats out onto the waters of the lake serenely and at his nephew's word, arrows of fire shoot out to set the bier ablaze. Loki hopes she drifts into Valhalla gloriously, the way she wasn't allowed to go in life.

 

Thor survives, in spite of his best efforts not to, and it is the arrival of his first granddaughter, a baby named for her grandmother, that draws him from his grief and back into himself. He will never quite be who he was before Sif died, but he is whole as he can be, and Loki is glad of it for him. He dotes on his grandniece as well, thankful that her presence is a balm to the King's soul. She joins the growing royal family; Loki's second daughter has birthed twins and his eldest son is expecting a child with his wife. He doesn't think his youngest girl will ever be a mother, but she is the best kind of aunt-fun and happy and mischievous and he wonders if one can somehow pass the mantle of God of Mischief on to another.

 

For a time, they are all happy.

 

Loki takes solace, however small, in the fact that his brother goes out with a blaze of glory. He is older and grayer and wiser, and his blue eye crinkles in the corner when he laughs. He looks too much like Odin for Loki's comfort but then again, perhaps this is the way it should be when one grows past youth. Thor never truly gets old, before he is killed in battle against alien forces hellbent on destroying Midgard, but he does age and he has lived a good life, adventurous and full. He has loved and laughed and cried and lost and he joins his parents and his wife and friends in the shining halls of Valhalla where Loki is sure his brother drinks mead by the gallons and where he hopes one day, there will be a seat saved from him.

 

When the eldest Thorson takes the throne, Loki stays as his nephew's trusted advisor. He watches the world change and pass around them. When Heimdall's watch finally ends, he buries him with a hole in his chest, but he gets through that pain with strength he did not know he possessed. He welcomes more grandchildren and he and Brunnhilde sit in the sunny courtyard and tell them all stories, of how their grandmama was a fierce Valkyrie and their grandpapa commanded armies and forces against the evil Thanos. And Loki knows that his wife is older than he, that she ages and that he really has not, that the differences in their blood and birth is what makes laugh lines and wrinkles appear on her face while his is still as new as the day they met.

 

She is still as beautiful to him, too, so he doesn't care. He tells her as such all the time, when she sits in front of her mirror and wraps long hair about her head in elegant braids, the dark brown tinged with silver until one day it is all shot through, and she looks like the goddess she should be. He thinks perhaps he loves her all the more for it.

 

But it is odd, the aging part. Or the lack thereof, on his end. He doesn't age a bit, even though his sons do and his daughters and his nephews grow older as well. He looks exactly the same as always and he thinks perhaps this the way of the Jotnar; that one day soon he will simply pass away to Valhalla, Norns willing, without the pain of getting old and gray. Loki has always been vain and so that thought is something of a comfort to him, something that his wife teases him about and he imagines he feels the aches and pains of age creeping up on him.

 

He does not, not truly, but Brunnhilde does.

 

She goes quietly, in her sleep, happy and warm and safe and loved. Oh, how she is loved, the people's Princess and in his heart, his Queen, and when she dies, a crevasse splits open inside his soul that will never be filled again. He thinks perhaps he will die with her, and he sobs great wracking sobs upon her death bed. It takes the strength of three people to pull him from her side, hours after she has slipped away, and he can not make himself watch her funeral. He locks himself inside the palace and sleeps for weeks, eating only when forced to by his youngest daughter, his baby. If it weren't for her, or the love of his children and grandchildren and nephews and great nieces and nephews, he thinks he would have died with Brunnhilde.

 

Later on, Loki knows that no matter how deep the grief is, he couldn't have died with her.

 

For years he surrounds himself with children, with little ones who crawl over him and beg him for stories and he obliges and something inside him tries to heal. He survives, on the strength of a child's love and heart, and he isn't happy, no, he will never be truly happy again.

 

He does not realize how right he really is.

* * *

 

 

One by one they all leave him, his nephews and his nephews' children; the pain of losing them is almost too great but it is when his eldest child dies, his firstborn daughter who he named for his mother, does he truly begin to break apart. He wonders how much grief one person can survive. Losing a child shouldn't happen. It isn't natural, it isn't right. And then he loses another, and another until he is left with the youngest girl, her wife, and his progeny, in the great big palace of New Asgardia. His brother's line has died out with a great granddaughter who didn't have any children of her own, and who succumbed to death the same way as Sif had. Loki realizes that with Asgard gone, more will be susceptible to illness in a way they never had before and it pains him to know that no matter what he does, he can not stop it.

 

The throne is no more, not in truth. The monarchy is gone and in it's place a sort of democracy headed by the people. He cares nothing at all for the politics of it now and so he boards a ship with his daughter and daughter in law and her children and they disappear from Midgard without so much as a goodbye. He will miss the palace there, he thinks, if only because it is where his children were all conceived and born but he won't miss the empty rooms and the haunting echos of a happier life.

 

They end up first on Vanaheim, and no one that he knew is there anymore, so he slips in undetected. There are Midgardians there too, now, as space travel is as common as anything. He finds rest there, for a few years, and he is not happy, but there is a little peace. When his daughter gets antsy she packs up their things and goes to leave, but her wife doesn't want to go with her and so they split, something that makes the remnants of Loki's soul ache. He has claimed the other woman as his own child and will miss her sorely. But this girl is of his blood and all he has left and so he goes with her, drifting for a while on various ships and realms to no where in particular.

 

They all think she is his lover, perhaps an older woman spoiling her young suitor and he doesn't correct anyone. It is easier than the truth, that he is going to outlive his own child, a baby he held in his arms, whose birth he witnessed. And neither of them talk about it either; she simply spends the rest of her life running and he runs with her, until one day she too is gone and he is now alone, truly and completely and there is nothing at all left for him in the nine realms.

 

When he gets back to Midgard, it is inhabitable. The humans have destroyed their Earth and she is taking her revenge and there goes the palace in Norway, there goes New Asgardia. He turns around then and goes back the way he came, drifting pass the ruins of what was once Asgard and finding a portal he'd long forgotten. Inside lay books and scrolls of importance; the history of the Aesir and their neighbors and he pores through them, hoping to find an explanation for what is wrong with him. It is after some searching does he get any sort of answer and what it implies tears him apart.

 

He will never grow old. He will never age. He will exist until he is all that has ever existed and he will never see anyone he's ever loved again.

 

He doesn't wake from the sleep that overtakes him for decades.

* * *

 

 

One day he wakes to find that the ship that he's on has drifted into a black hole, and he ends up on Sakaar again, for the first time in so long he does not know. Here, everything is much the same as it was and he takes a bit of comfort in that, greeting the Grandmaster like an old friend instead of the psychotic heathen the man was back then. They become fast friends and eventually, once more, lovers, something he has not allowed himself to do since Brunnhilde died. The Grandmaster doesn't age either, Loki knows, and this is his one respite, that finally, finally, he will have someone with him that will never leave him.

 

Until he does leave. There is a coup, one of the many that has happened in the eons of time that passes in Sakaar unnaturally. But there is something different about this one, and somehow the slaves and scrappers overtake the Grandmaster and execute him, leaving Loki alone, once again, and on his own. They don't bother to kill him, either not worried about him or unwilling to shed more blood than necessary and life improves for everyone on the junk planet in ways it never would have had the coup not happened. For a while he distracts himself with politics and helps them remake their world into something more reasonable and less totalitarian until they elect him as their president, until he eventually secures more and more power, until the socialist republic they'd set out to build becomes just another monarchy.

 

And slowly, Loki loses himself. He forgets them all, or mostly them all, except Brunnhilde. He can never forget her.

 

He grows bored with Sakaar and boards the ship he came on back towards the Nine Realms to find that more time has passed than he thought. He knows not how much. He has taken to wearing his true Jotnar form now, red eyes and blue skin a beautiful and terrible image to whomever crosses his path. Vanaheim is in ruins and Jotunheim is empty, leaving only Svartálfaheim and Muspelheim to rest on, but neither will have him and he can not truly blame them. He turns around to Asgard, or what once was Asgard, to find that something there is coalesced into the beginnings of a new foundation. He does not want it to, but hope springs inside him again and so he continues on to Midgard, surprised that anything survived the Earth's wrath. But there are people who live here, of various skin colors and sizes and types, animals he's never seen or heard of, plant life that is as foreign to him as anything he could imagine.

 

And yet, they seem to know who he is.

 

“He has returned,” they whisper frantically, when the ship lands in once was Norway and he finds the ruins of the old palace that used to be home. “He has come to bless us,” they say and Loki does not argue. There is no need.

 

He already knows he will outlive all these people too, and he is prepared to watch them fade into the annals of time like everyone before them has already.

 

He is surprised, however, by how hardy they are, and he realizes something unusual about them after observing for a while. They have rebuilt his palace and it is more grand and much larger than it had been before. It's here they turn to worshiping him, some with red eyes and dusky skin and others with skin as blue as sapphires, with horns and talons and long sharp teeth. They tell stories about their creation, of how Loki Silvertongue took the Valkyrie to wife and sired the Five, how everyone on this planet and even past it are the offspring of that union, and how one day, the great being would come back to visit his children. Loki wants to scream at them, to make them stop the lies. _No! I am no father of yours! I am not your sire, I did not make you!_ But he knows the truth, and after many years he stops fighting it.

 

They are his progeny, and he is their god.

 

They treat the earth much better than the humans who came before them so long ago and she flourishes under their care. In some ways, so does he. He is a benevolent god, of course, and the seidr that once dwelled in him has surpassed even is own imagination in that he can do anything he truly wants, except to die of course. He is doomed to wander this universe for eternity, and so he will cherish the little ones who look to him for worship and comfort. They all do, eventually, die as he'd thought, but the dying numbs him now. He does not grow attached anymore. He is ambivalent to everything, though kind. Occasionally he allows some of them to act as tribute and takes them to bed, but they are not his lovers, he tells himself. They are simply offering him their worship and who is he to deny them?

 

_Loki is Death and he is Life. He giveth and he taketh away. He is peace and anger, sorrow and joy. He is the pain and the pleasure. Loki is all and gives all and takes all. Amen._

 

They pray and pass it on to their children and their children's children's children. It leaves Midgard and expands to the other realms that now hold his prospering progeny and he no longer remembers who he was before. He is an entity now, no longer a person and one day he leaves the palace they have crafted for him, goes back to the anchor that will one day again be Asgard, and wraps himself in solitude and loneliness.

 

This is his penance.

* * *

 

 

He doesn't know, not anymore, how long it's been since he's seen anyone else but his own shadow, but eventually she finds him there, in the burgeoning mountains of the infant planet. She is alone, and she stands before him on his marble throne unafraid and smirking, familiar in a way he at first, doesn't recognize.

 

“Why have you come here, little one?” he asks. His voice should be rusty from a millennia of disuse but it is as velvet and seductive as it's always been. Nothing about him changes.

 

She only grins, daring to saunter up to him and then she kneels, at his feet, and looks at him through long dark lashes. She is draped in cloth of gold and onyx, gems and diadems at her head and a gilded sword strapped across her back. It looks like something he may have seen before, but it's been so long that he can no longer place it.

 

“For you,” she says, and her voice is like a rush of blood to his head. It is the first thing he has truly felt in a long time and it frightens him. He hasn't been afraid in so very long. He leans forward, his eyes mapping every inch of her. She is beautiful, skin the color of burnt umber, her eyes like endless pools of dark, raw honey. She is a both new and enchanting as well as welcoming and well-known. And she seems to know more about him than he even does, so that he presses her for information, of things long forgotten even to himself. She stands as she begins to speak.

 

“You are Loki, son of Odin and Frigga, brother of Thor. You are the God of Mischief and the slayer of Thanos. You loved and bedded a Valkyrie, took her to wife, sired children with her and watched them grow. And now you are truly a God, the Father of everything and everyone living with all the Nine Realms,” she says, her hands kept respectfully at her sides and he watches the way she moves around his throne, how the light of the new sun gleams across her flesh.

 

She is right, of course. He thinks wryly of a younger him, someone he had forgotten about but now can remember sharply, who had craved power and glory. He wishes he could tell that younger him that he wouldn't have wanted it.

 

“Do you request anything from me?” he asks, and she shakes her head, rounding the left of the throne he sits on and sliding into his lap effortlessly. It should not feel so right, this girl against him, but it does and he wonders how long it's been since he's taken anyone to bed. Not since becoming God, he thinks. Not since before he ascended to this otherworldly status as a deity. “Only you,” she says and she grins, leans forward, and kisses him deeply so that he is stunned and breathless for the first time in forever. When she is done, and his lips are raw and swollen from her onslaught, he thinks to ask her her name, but only after he has ordered her to stay with him, to warm his bed, and to be his wife. It is the first time he has ever thought to take another as such and it feels right.

 

She slides the silken wisps of cloth from her lush body and wraps her long arms about him, leaning over to whisper into his ear.

 

“Sigyn,” she says and he mouths the word softly, breathes it in.

 

This is, _finally_ , the beginning of his end.

* * *

 

 

She lives with him for one thousand years. The people of the realms worship the girl in turn as their Goddess and his Queen and he allows it, allows her into his soul and heart in a way no one has been since long before. He thinks perhaps that he is barren now, that even though he is an eternal being he can not sire children but her belly swells with his seed and she births him nine beautiful babies, one for each of the realms he resides over. She is an ever present source of comfort for him and he adores her, though he insists that he can never give her his whole heart. “I do not know if I even possess one anymore,” he admits one day, and she stretches out beside them on their great big bed, humming softly in contentment. “I lost every piece when I lost everyone dear to me...long before you existed, sweet one.”

 

“You have a heart, my lord,” she murmurs, stroking the lines and markings of his blue skin softly. “Right here,” and she taps his chest, slides her small hand across the hot skin there and presses her lips to it. He wants to imagine that he is truly happy again, but he knows, as he has always known, that she too will leave him, though he has been given more sons and daughters to fill the void when she does go.

 

But she doesn't leave him, not for one thousand years, and never really does she truly ever leave him at all. Instead, it is one night, after they have taken their fill of pleasure, does something change and Loki feels it before he can name it. She is distant, his sweet girl, and crying though she smiles bravely through her tears. He is distraught and can not comfort her and he promises her the galaxy but she breaks away from him, goes to the mountains and sequesters herself there for one very long year. Loki is patient and he sends her tidings of his care by means of his children, who visit their mother once every week and who tell him that all is as it should be.

 

“Mother needs strength,” they all say, every time. “But what for?” he asks, and red eyes close and turn away from him, leaving him alone in the quiet of his obsidian palace.

 

When she finally comes down from the mountain she is much like she was the day he met her, fierce and fiery and determined. She wraps her arms about him and kisses him, peels his clothes from him and sinks down onto his hardness, takes him fast and furiously on his cold black throne. He doesn't realize that the palace is burning until after he comes; he panics when he can not stop the blaze from where he sits, when the magic inside him fails him.

 

“It is empty,” she explains, and then she withdraws a dagger, one he suddenly remembers and he wants to cry for the first time in ages. Names and places and people and things rush into his mind until he is crying, great big heaving sobs that won't stop and she cries with him, though she smiles through her tears. He only then notices, as she presses the dagger into his palm, that his nine children are standing in the room with them, each one of them circled around him like a sentry. “And now it is time, my lord,” she says, her voice gentle and strong. To Loki's horror, she twists his wrist and points the dagger at her chest, right at her heart.

 

“You must push forward,” she says. He still cries and he shakes his head. He has not the strength and he doesn't know why she's doing this and he will not-

 

“Yes, you can,” she coos, and then his children all speak in unison, agreeing with their mother. “Yes, you can Father,” they say, their voices calming him, their eyes loving and eager.

 

“We will miss you,” a daughter says. “But you must go now, if you ever will,” a son finishes and then he gazes at their beautiful faces, all of them so much like himself and so much like Sigyn, who still sits naked on his lap and who patiently waits for him to plunge the dagger into her chest. And yet, he still hesitates. It is only when she speaks again does he find the courage to do the deed.

 

“ _Come on Lackey_ ,” she says and his heart stops in his chest, his blood runs cold. “I miss you. Come home to me. Come home.”

 

The faces of his brother and his mother and even his father, of his five children, his two nephews, of his sister in law and his grandchildren and his friends and everything and everyone he has ever loved come to his tear blurred eyes but it is his Brunnhilde who sits in front of him now, it is her eyes and lips and smile and her voice calling him and so he pushes forward, plunges the dagger his mother gave him so very long ago into Sigyn's chest and she screams silently, a gasping breath pushing from her lungs as she begins to die.

 

She is crying as she bleeds out and he is too, and the palace is burning again. “Go now, dear ones,” she whispers, weakened as she is fading and her children all flee the fire and the smoke, silent goodbyes for their father and mother on their tongues.

 

“This is it, my lord,” she tells him and that is her final words, before she slumps over, the life fading from her eyes when she does. He does not know what overcomes him but he withdraws the dagger and licks it clean, her blood salty and bitter on his tongue and he can't stop. He tears her open, devours her then, rabid and wicked like a wild animal, and as the throne turns to molten rock beneath him and he goes up into flames with it, he laughs.

* * *

 

 

The next time he opens his eyes, he is in a field of gold. The sky is all pink and orange and red, an endless dawn on one end of the horizon, eternal dusk on the other. He does not have to wonder where he is and he almost doesn't move then, certain he will wake from a dream and find himself alone again, in the cold darkness of space or isolated on the ruins of some dismal planet. But some time passes and nothing changes, just a soft stirring of the warm wind and the rustle of the wheat field around him.

 

He begins to walk then, toward the horizon and he doesn't know how long it takes him but he finally sees the hall in the distance. His heart speeds up and he starts to run now, tears streaming down his cheeks, and he hears music there. He can almost imagine there's a seat saved for him, that there is a mug of ale waiting, that strong arms and loving hands and everyone he loves will be there waiting for him. Once again, he is right, but this time his heart is full to bursting and they are rushing out to meet him, all of them.

 

He sees her first and she is crying too, but the smirk on her face is what makes him fall to his knees. He doesn't know who to thank for this, for saving him, for their mercy. All he knows is that she is holding him again and he will never spend another moment without her. Not for eternity. Brunnhilde runs her fingers through his dark hair and holds him as he shakes, as the chasm inside him finally heals after so many millions of years.

 

“You came home to me, Lackey. _You came home_.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> The idea that Loki could actually live to infinity came from a line in gaslightgallows' fic, The Convalescent Way. I took that idea and ran with it. I probably took that idea and jet packed across the damn galaxy with it, but here we are.
> 
> But yeah, come tell me how weird I am on tumblr. lilithenaltum is my url there too. :)


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